THE MORMONATOR: MITT ROMNEY’S BLINDING AMBITION. PLUS, THE INEXPLICABLE
OPPOSITION TO AN ARMENIAN-GENOCIDE MEMORIAL

The Phoenix, MA
Oct 25 2006

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Political dynasties are as American as apple pie. Since the Civil War,
witness the marks made ‘ or still being made (for better or worse) ‘ by
the Tafts of Ohio, the Stevensons of Illinois, the Roosevelts of New
York, the Bayhs of Indiana, the Bushes of Connecticut and Texas, the
Clintons of Arkansas and New York, and the Kennedys of Massachusetts,
New York, and Rhode Island.

Now comes Mitt Romney, son of George, who as governor of Michigan in
1968 unsuccessfully sought to become the first Mormon elected president.
Son Mitt hopes to succeed where dad George failed. And Mitt, the
governor of Massachusetts, is not going to let anything stand in his
way. On the surface he is as smooth and as gentlemanly as his dad. But
in his heart Mitt is a sharpie, as cold as he is ambitious. Like George
Bush II, who saw his dad outflanked on the right by Reagan, and on the
left by Clinton, Mitt Romney is not going let the failings of his
paternity mess with his success. His will to power, whatever the price,
is straight out of Nietzsche. And his desire to do his dad one better,
whatever the cost, feels like pure Freud.

Armchair analysis aside, Mitt Romney’s dedication to his own success is
undebatable. With the help of Christy Mihos (a politically delicious
irony), he strong-armed Republican acting governor Jane Swift aside to
stake his claim to Beacon Hill. He shamelessly fudged his Utah residency
to get on the Massachusetts ballot. He cavalierly abandoned
Massachusetts’s voters after two years in order to launch his White
House run, and he held on to his office to use it as a convenient bully
pulpit. From that perch he morphed from a centrist to a right-winger,
flip-flopping on choice and suggesting ‘ with a straight face ‘ that the
sort of stem-cell research conducted at Children’s Hospital and Harvard
Medical School should be criminalized. Mitt Romney: what an hombre.

In his latest exercise in duplicity, Romney secretly lobbied an
influential member of the Mormon church’s innermost ruling council to
leverage resources in the service of his White House campaign. The
scandal of this is that Romney has long sought to wrap himself in the
mantle of Roman Catholic John Kennedy, who in his 1960 presidential run
stressed that he would not be an ideological slave to the pope. On the
eve of that election American Protestants ‘ especially the evangelicals
and fundamentalists whom Romney now courts so assiduously ‘ still feared
Rome’s potential influence on the American Caesar. (What a difference 50
or so years can make.)

The case for an Armenian memorial

The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Mayor Thomas Menino, and the
Greenway Conservancy advisory board chaired by well-respected corporate
citizen Peter Meade all agree that a proposed monument commemorating the
deaths of at least 600,000 Armenians in the Turkish-prosecuted genocide
– the first historically recognized genocide – has no place in a park
named after Rose Kennedy, located on land cleared by the Big Dig near
the waterfront. We ask this simple and clearly inconvenient question:
why not? Are these Boston worthies afraid of offending local Muslim
sensibilities? Is their vision of the Rose Kennedy Greenway so sterile
and so suburban as to hold that history should not punctuate the reality
of this public space as it does so elegantly in the Public Garden and
along the Commonwealth Avenue Mall? Our advice is simple: set a limit.
Reserve space for a set number of monuments and memorials. Devise design
requirements. And set a high-minded example by approving this worthy
project. The august and historic Public Garden found a place for a
tasteful and quietly moving memorial to local victims of the 9/11
attacks. The Holocaust is memorialized near Faneuil Hall. The Irish
Potato Famine is remembered on Washington Street near Downtown Crossing.
The firemen who fell battling the blaze that almost destroyed the Hotel
Vendome, in 1972, are honored for their service on the nearby mall –
although approval for that modest shrine required a shameful battle.

The Armenian slaughter, together with Hitler’s holocaust, Pol Pot’s
massacre of his fellow Cambodians, and today’s carnage in the Sudan,
stand as sad testimonies to mankind’s capacity for inhumanity. We
memorialize tragic events such as these so that we may remember and
learn. Surely in these early days of the 21st century we have it in our
hearts to join in communion with our Armenian friends and neighbors, and
together say: never again.